R2.12 Political developments in the USA and Canada (1960–2020)

Between 1960 and 2020 the USA and Canada, two federal democracies with closely linked economies, faced many of the same problems: how far government should provide welfare and manage the economy, how to answer demands for equal rights, and how to respond to economic shocks. They answered in different ways, and their politics divided along different lines: in the USA, increasingly, between two hostile parties; in Canada, between regions and above all over the place of Quebec.

Two countries, two political systems

The USA has a presidential system. The president is elected separately from Congress, so a president often faces a Congress controlled by the other party (divided government) and must bargain to pass laws. Power is also split between the federal government and the fifty states, and the Supreme Court can strike down laws that break the Constitution. Two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, have dominated throughout.

Canada has a parliamentary system on the British model. The prime minister is the leader of the party that commands a majority in the House of Commons and governs as long as that majority lasts. A prime minister with a majority can pass laws far more easily than a president, but a minority government depends on the support of other parties and can fall on a vote of no confidence. Canada’s federal system gives the ten provinces wide powers, including over health, education and natural resources, which is one reason why relations with Quebec dominated national politics.

Key: D = Democrat, R = Republican; L = Liberal, PC = Progressive Conservative, C = Conservative (from 2003).

The timeline of the USA shows the regular swing of the presidency between the parties. Underneath it, the balance of ideas changed more slowly: the 1960s were the high point of confidence in federal government action, and from 1980 the language of lower taxes and smaller government set the terms of debate for both parties.

The Canadian timeline shows longer periods of one-party rule, above all by the Liberals, who governed for about 37 of the 60 years. The constant thread is the relationship between Quebec and the rest of Canada, which shaped elections, constitutional change and the fate of parties.

Kennedy and the New Frontier, 1961–1963

The election of 1960

John F. Kennedy, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, defeated the Republican vice-president Richard Nixon in November 1960 by about 112,000 votes out of almost 69 million, one of the narrowest results of the twentieth century. He was the first Catholic president and, at 43, the youngest person elected to the office. The four televised debates, the first on 26 September 1960, showed the new importance of television: Kennedy appeared calm and confident, and Nixon, recovering from illness, looked tired.

Kennedy had promised to “get the country moving again” after the slow growth and recessions of the late 1950s. In his acceptance speech of July 1960 he called his programme the New Frontier: action on the economy, poverty, health care for the elderly, education, civil rights and space.

What the New Frontier achieved

Kennedy’s record in Congress was modest, and most of his successes were in economic policy:

• Jobs and depressed areas. The Area Redevelopment Act (1961) gave loans and grants to regions of high unemployment such as Appalachia. The Manpower Development and Training Act (1962) paid for the retraining of workers whose jobs had been lost to new machinery.

• Wages and housing. The minimum wage rose from US$1.00 to US$1.25 an hour in stages and was extended to about 3.6 million more workers; the Housing Act (1961) funded urban renewal and low-cost housing.

• Trade and growth. The Trade Expansion Act (1962) gave the president power to negotiate lower tariffs. In 1963 Kennedy proposed a large tax cut to stimulate demand, a Keynesian policy; it passed after his death, as the Revenue Act of February 1964.

• Women. Kennedy set up the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women in December 1961, and the Equal Pay Act (June 1963) banned paying women less than men for the same work.

• Space. In a speech to Congress on 25 May 1961, Kennedy committed the country to landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. The space programme poured federal money into the South and West and into universities and the aerospace industry.

The limits of the New Frontier

The larger reforms failed. Kennedy’s bills for health insurance for the elderly (Medicare) and for federal aid to education were defeated or stalled. The main obstacle was the conservative coalition in Congress: Republicans and Southern Democrats who together outvoted the liberals and controlled key committees, such as the House Rules Committee. Aid to education also foundered on whether Catholic schools should receive money. Kennedy was more forceful with business: when US Steel raised its prices in April 1962, against an agreement his administration had brokered with the unions, he publicly attacked the company and threatened government action until it backed down, which damaged his relations with business leaders.

Kennedy was also cautious on civil rights, because he needed Southern Democratic votes. He relied at first on executive action, such as sending federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders (1961) and troops to enforce the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi (1962). Only after the protests in Birmingham, Alabama, did he announce a civil rights bill, in a television address on 11 June 1963. The struggle of the civil rights movement itself is a separate regional study; here it matters as a pressure on the president and his party.

Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963. The Warren Commission, appointed by Johnson, concluded in September 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone, though doubts about this conclusion have persisted among the public ever since.

Johnson and the Great Society, 1963–1969

Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texan who had been the Democratic leader of the Senate, became president on Kennedy’s death. He used the national mood of mourning and his own great skill at handling Congress to pass Kennedy’s stalled bills, and then went much further.

The Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty, 1964

Johnson made civil rights his first priority. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed on 2 July after the longest filibuster in the history of the Senate, banned segregation in public places and discrimination in employment. In his State of the Union address of 8 January 1964 he declared an “unconditional war on poverty”. The Economic Opportunity Act (August 1964) created the War on Poverty programmes:

• the Job Corps, which trained young people from poor families;

• VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), a domestic version of the Peace Corps;

• the Community Action Program, which funded local agencies run with the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor themselves;

• Head Start (from 1965), which gave pre-school education, meals and health checks to poor children.

Johnson presented these measures as the first step towards a wider vision, which he set out in a speech at the University of Michigan.

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

Lyndon B. Johnson, commencement address at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 22 May 1964. Johnson spoke to students in an election year, at a time of rapid economic growth, and the speech assumes that prosperity would pay for reform without higher taxes. Its value as a source is in showing the ambition of 1960s liberalism: the aim was to improve the quality of American life, not only to relieve hardship.

The landslide of 1964 and the 89th Congress

In November 1964 Johnson defeated the conservative Republican Barry Goldwater with 61.1 per cent of the vote, still the largest share of the popular vote since 1820. The Democrats won more than two-thirds of the seats in both houses of Congress. With this majority, the 89th Congress (1965–1966) passed more major laws than any since the New Deal of the 1930s.

The Great Society therefore went beyond the War on Poverty to cover health, education, civil rights, immigration, the environment, culture and consumer protection. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 had large long-term effects that few expected at the time: by opening entry to people from Asia, Latin America and Africa, it changed the make-up of the American population over the following decades.

How successful was the Great Society?

The poverty rate fell sharply in the 1960s. The line graph of the official poverty rate shows the share of Americans below the poverty line falling from 19.0 per cent in 1964 to 11.1 per cent in 1973. Poverty among the elderly fell fastest, helped by Medicare and by rises in Social Security pensions. Medicaid and Medicare gave millions of people access to health care for the first time, and Head Start and federal school aid reached millions of children.

The limits were also clear. Much of the fall in poverty came from economic growth, which was rapid until 1969. The Community Action Program angered big-city Democratic mayors, who saw federally funded local agencies as rivals, and Congress cut back its powers. Above all, the war in Vietnam took money and attention away from domestic reform from 1965 onwards: spending on the War on Poverty was never close to what its planners had hoped for. Inflation began to rise from 1966, and in 1968 Johnson had to accept a tax surcharge to pay for the war.

The unravelling of Johnson’s presidency, 1965–1968

From 1965 Johnson’s coalition broke apart. Riots in Black neighbourhoods of American cities (Watts in Los Angeles in August 1965; Newark and Detroit in July 1967) were followed by a white backlash against civil rights and welfare spending. In the midterm elections of 1966 the Republicans gained 47 seats in the House. The war in Vietnam divided the Democratic Party, and the gap between the government’s optimistic claims and the reality of the war, called the credibility gap, eroded public trust in the president.

After the Tet Offensive of January 1968 and a strong challenge from the anti-war senator Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary, Johnson announced on 31 March 1968 that he would not seek re-election. Historians weigh his record in very different ways, but few deny that his domestic achievements were among the largest of any president.

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Party conflict and realignment in the 1960s and 1970s

In 1960 both main parties were broad coalitions. The Democrats joined Northern liberals, labour unions, urban Catholics, Jewish voters and African Americans with conservative white Southerners, who had voted Democratic since the Civil War (the “Solid South”). The Republicans included both conservatives from the Midwest and West and liberal or moderate “Rockefeller Republicans” from the north-east, named after Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York. Over the next twenty years each party became more uniform, a process political scientists call realignment.

Divisions within the Democratic Party

The civil rights laws of 1964–1965 split the Democrats along regional lines. Southern Democrats in Congress voted overwhelmingly against them, and Johnson is often reported to have expected that the party would lose the South for a generation. Vietnam created a second split, between the party leadership and an anti-war wing of students and liberals.

The crisis came in 1968. After Johnson withdrew, Senator Robert Kennedy, the late president’s brother, won several primaries but was assassinated in Los Angeles on 5 June (he died the next day). At the party convention in Chicago in August, police clashed with anti-war protesters outside while the delegates nominated Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who had not run in a single primary. The former Alabama governor George Wallace ran as the candidate of the American Independent Party on a programme of opposition to desegregation and “law and order”; he won 13.5 per cent of the vote and five Southern states.

After their defeat, the Democrats set up the McGovern–Fraser Commission (1969–1972), which made primary elections the main way of choosing delegates and required more women, young people and members of minorities among them. Party leaders and union bosses lost influence. In 1972 the new rules helped the anti-war senator George McGovern win the nomination, but he lost 49 states to Nixon, which convinced many in the party that it had moved too far from ordinary voters.

The rise of conservatism in the Republican Party

Conservative activists captured the Republican nomination in 1964 for Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona who opposed the expansion of federal power, including the Civil Rights Act. Goldwater lost heavily, but he won five states of the Deep South, the first sign that Southern whites would vote Republican. A televised speech for Goldwater, “A Time for Choosing” (27 October 1964), made the actor Ronald Reagan a conservative star; he was elected governor of California in 1966. Young conservatives had organised in Young Americans for Freedom (1960), and the movement built its own magazines, think tanks and fund-raising networks.

Nixon, who won the presidency in 1968 with 43.4 per cent of the vote, followed what became known as the Southern strategy: an appeal to white Southern and suburban voters through calls for “law and order”, opposition to busing for school integration, and attacks on student protesters and the counterculture. In a speech of November 1969 he appealed to the “silent majority” of Americans who did not protest. In 1972 he won 49 states, including the whole South.

The diagram of party realignment shows the main movements. The shift took decades: the South elected Democrats to state and local offices into the 1990s, and many white working-class Northerners stayed Democratic in Congress elections while voting Republican for president. By the 1980s, though, the Republican Party had become the conservative party and the Democrats the liberal one.

The New Right and the Religious Right

In the 1970s new conservative movements joined the Republican coalition. The New Right opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion after Roe v. Wade (1973), high taxes and what it saw as the moral permissiveness of the 1960s. California’s Proposition 13 (June 1978), which capped property taxes, started a national “tax revolt”. In 1979 the Baptist minister Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, which registered evangelical Christians to vote; this Religious Right became one of the most loyal parts of the Republican coalition from 1980 onwards. Feminism and its opponents are a focused study of their own; here the point is how these conflicts reshaped the parties.

Nixon’s domestic policies, 1969–1974

Nixon’s domestic record is more liberal than his political rhetoric suggested. Facing a Democratic Congress throughout, he accepted much of the Great Society and expanded parts of it, while trying to shift power and money from Washington to the states.

New Federalism and welfare

Under the label New Federalism, the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act (1972) introduced revenue sharing: federal money given to states and cities with few conditions attached. Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (1969), drafted with the advice of the Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, would have replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the main federal programme of cash welfare for poor families, with a guaranteed minimum income for poor families. It passed the House but died in the Senate, opposed by conservatives as too generous and by liberals as too mean. A narrower measure, Supplemental Security Income (1972), did create a federal minimum income for the elderly, blind and disabled, and Social Security pensions were tied to inflation from 1972.

Environment, regulation and civil rights

More regulatory agencies were created under Nixon than under any president since Franklin Roosevelt. Responding to a fast-growing environmental movement, he set up the Environmental Protection Agency (December 1970) and signed the Clean Air Act (1970) and the Endangered Species Act (1973). The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (1970) regulated workplace safety. The Twenty-sixth Amendment (1971) lowered the voting age to 18, and Title IX (1972) banned sex discrimination in federally funded education.

On civil rights Nixon’s record was mixed. His administration oversaw the desegregation of most Southern school systems, which had resisted the Brown decision of 1954 for fifteen years, and his Philadelphia Plan (1969) required building contractors on federal projects to set targets for hiring Black workers, an early form of affirmative action. At the same time he opposed busing children between districts to integrate schools and tried, unsuccessfully, to appoint two Southern judges to the Supreme Court whom the Senate rejected in 1969–1970.

The economy and the beginning of stagflation

Inflation, fed by spending on Vietnam and the Great Society, reached about 6 per cent in 1970. On 15 August 1971 Nixon announced a 90-day freeze on wages and prices, a 10 per cent tax on imports and the end of the convertibility of the dollar into gold, which ended the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates set up in 1944. Controls helped him win re-election in 1972, but inflation returned when they were lifted. The Arab oil embargo of October 1973 quadrupled oil prices, and the USA entered the combination of high inflation and high unemployment called stagflation, which dominated the rest of the decade.

The Watergate scandal and the pardon of Nixon, 1972–1977

Watergate is the name for the political scandal that began with a burglary at the Democratic Party’s offices in the Watergate building in Washington in June 1972 and ended with Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. The burglars were linked to the Committee to Re-elect the President. The scandal was less about the burglary itself than about the cover-up that the White House organised afterwards, and about the wider abuses of power that investigators uncovered: secret political “dirty tricks”, illegal campaign funds, the use of the tax authorities and the FBI against political opponents, and a break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers.

The vertical timeline of Watergate shows how the scandal moved through three stages. Investigative reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, helped by the FBI official Mark Felt (known as “Deep Throat”), kept the story alive in 1972. Televised Senate hearings from May 1973 brought it to the whole country. The decisive turn came when an aide revealed in July 1973 that Nixon recorded his conversations. Nixon refused to hand over the tapes, claiming executive privilege, until the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in United States v. Nixon (24 July 1974) that this privilege could not be used to withhold evidence in a criminal case.

The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against Nixon in late July 1974: obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress. The release on 5 August of the “smoking gun” tape, in which Nixon had ordered the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation six days after the break-in, destroyed his remaining support among Republicans in Congress. Facing certain impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate, Nixon resigned on 9 August 1974, the only president to do so. Several dozen officials were convicted, among them his former attorney general John Mitchell and his two closest aides, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman.

Gerald Ford and the pardon

Gerald Ford, a long-serving Republican congressman from Michigan, had become vice-president in December 1973 under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, after Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned over tax evasion. He was the only person to serve as both vice-president and president without being elected to either office. On taking office on 9 August 1974 he told the country: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” A month later, on 8 September, he granted Nixon a full pardon for any federal crimes he might have committed as president.

Theirs is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.

Gerald R. Ford, televised remarks on signing the proclamation granting a pardon to Richard Nixon, 8 September 1974. Ford spoke on a Sunday morning with little warning, aware that the decision would be unpopular. His justification rests on national healing and on his belief that a fair trial would be impossible after so much publicity. As evidence, the speech shows Ford’s stated reasons; it cannot by itself settle the suspicion, widespread at the time, that the pardon had been agreed in advance as the price of Nixon’s resignation, which Ford denied when he testified to a House subcommittee in October 1974.

The pardon damaged Ford badly. His approval rating fell from about 71 to about 50 per cent in a month (Gallup), and his press secretary resigned in protest. In the midterm elections of November 1974 the Democrats gained 49 seats in the House; many of the new members, the “Watergate babies”, were young reformers. On 16 September 1974 Ford offered conditional clemency to draft evaders and deserters of the Vietnam War in return for up to two years of alternative service, a compromise that satisfied neither the anti-war left nor veterans’ groups. Ford also faced stagflation, with inflation of about 11 per cent in 1974 and unemployment of 9 per cent in 1975. His voluntary anti-inflation campaign, “Whip Inflation Now”, was widely mocked. When he refused federal help to bankrupt New York City in October 1975, the New York Daily News ran the headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead”, words he never used. He survived a strong challenge from Reagan for the Republican nomination in 1976 but lost narrowly to Jimmy Carter.

The effects of Watergate

Watergate confirmed the warnings of critics such as the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose book The Imperial Presidency (1973) argued that presidential power, built up through war and the Cold War, had escaped the checks of the Constitution. Congress responded with a series of laws to restrain the presidency:

• the War Powers Resolution (1973), passed over Nixon’s veto, which required the president to consult Congress before sending troops into combat and to withdraw them within 60 days without its approval;

• the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act (1974), which stopped presidents from refusing to spend money that Congress had voted;

• amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act (1974), which limited campaign donations and created the Federal Election Commission;

• the Ethics in Government Act (1978), which provided for independent prosecutors to investigate senior officials.

In 1975–1976 the Senate’s Church Committee also exposed illegal surveillance and covert operations by the CIA and the FBI, including the FBI’s COINTELPRO programme against civil rights and left-wing groups. The longer-term effect was on public opinion. The bar chart of trust in government shows that the share of Americans who trusted the federal government most of the time fell from 77 per cent in 1964 to 36 per cent in 1974 and 25 per cent in 1980.

Watergate was only one cause of this fall. Trust was already declining because of Vietnam, the urban riots and the conflicts of the late 1960s, and it fell further under the economic failures of the 1970s. Watergate’s particular effect was to make suspicion of politicians and of the presidency itself a permanent feature of American politics, and to make the press and Congress more aggressive in investigating the executive.

Carter and the crisis of confidence, 1977–1981

Jimmy Carter, a former governor of Georgia, won the presidency in 1976 as an outsider who promised honesty after Watergate. On his first full day in office he pardoned men who had evaded the draft during the Vietnam War. Although the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, Carter’s relations with his own party were poor: he distrusted the deal-making of Washington, and liberal Democrats saw his concern with balanced budgets as a betrayal of the party’s traditions.

Policies and achievements

• Energy. Carter called the energy problem “the moral equivalent of war”. He created the Department of Energy (1977) and passed the National Energy Act (1978), which encouraged conservation and domestic production.

• Deregulation. The Airline Deregulation Act (1978) and laws freeing road haulage and railways from federal price controls (1980) began the move away from regulated industries that Reagan continued.

• Government and environment. He created the Department of Education (1979), protected over 100 million acres of Alaskan land (1980) and set up the Superfund to clean up toxic waste sites (1980).

The economy and the “malaise” speech

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 caused a second oil shock. Petrol shortages produced long queues at filling stations, and inflation rose to 11.3 per cent in 1979 and 13.5 per cent in 1980. After ten days of consultation at Camp David, Carter gave a televised address on 15 July 1979.

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.

Jimmy Carter, televised address to the nation (the “Crisis of Confidence” speech), 15 July 1979. Carter, a devout Baptist, spoke in moral terms and blamed a loss of faith in the future as well as the energy crisis. The speech was well received at first, but critics soon called it the “malaise” speech, a word Carter never used, because it seemed to blame the American people. Days later he asked his whole cabinet to resign. The source shows how a president read the troubles of the 1970s as a spiritual crisis, which helps explain why Reagan’s optimism appealed to voters a year later.

In August 1979 Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the USA. Volcker raised interest rates to unprecedented levels to squeeze inflation out of the economy, which led to a recession in 1980. The seizure of the US embassy in Tehran on 4 November 1979, where 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days, and the failure of a military rescue in April 1980, made Carter look weak. Senator Edward Kennedy challenged him for the Democratic nomination, and in November 1980 Reagan won 44 states.

Reagan and Reaganomics, 1981–1989

Ronald Reagan came to office with a clear diagnosis of the country’s problems.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, 20 January 1981. The sentence is often quoted without its first words, “In this present crisis”, which limit it to the economic emergency of 1981. Reagan spoke after a decade of stagflation, to an audience that had just given him a large victory, and the speech marks the shift from the confidence in federal action of the 1960s to a belief that taxes, spending and regulation were holding the economy back.

Reagan’s popularity rose after he survived an assassination attempt on 30 March 1981, and he used it to pass his economic programme through a Congress in which the Democrats still held the House.

The four parts of Reaganomics

Reaganomics is the name given to Reagan’s economic policies. They drew on supply-side economics, the theory that lower taxes on income and investment would encourage people to work, save and invest, so that the economy would grow fast enough to limit the loss of tax revenue.

Reagan also confronted organised labour. When some 13,000 air traffic controllers of the PATCO union went on an illegal strike in August 1981, he fired more than 11,000 who refused to return to work. The decision encouraged private employers to take a harder line against unions, whose share of the workforce continued to fall.

Results and costs

The figure on Reaganomics sets out the results. The first effect was a severe recession: unemployment reached 10.8 per cent in November and December 1982, the highest since the 1930s, and the Republicans lost 26 House seats in the midterm elections. From 1983 the economy grew strongly, inflation stayed low and about 16 million jobs were added by 1989. Reagan’s 1984 campaign advertisement “It’s morning again in America” captured the recovery, and he won 49 states.

Critics point to the costs. Revenues did not grow fast enough to pay for the tax cuts and the defence build-up, so the federal debt nearly tripled, and Reagan himself agreed to tax increases in 1982 and 1984 to limit the deficit. The gains of the 1980s went disproportionately to high earners, while poverty remained higher than in the 1970s, as the poverty line graph shows. Deregulation of the savings and loan banks was followed by the failure of more than 1,000 of them between 1986 and 1995, which cost taxpayers about US$124 billion. The stock market crash of “Black Monday” (19 October 1987) showed the instability of the new financial markets.

Social policy and the conservative agenda

Reagan’s social record was less radical than his rhetoric. A bipartisan commission under Alan Greenspan rescued Social Security in 1983 by raising payroll taxes and, gradually, the retirement age. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986) gave legal status to about 2.7 million undocumented immigrants while penalising employers who hired illegal workers. Reagan appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor (1981), but the Senate rejected his conservative nominee Robert Bork in 1987, a fight that made Supreme Court appointments far more partisan. His administration was widely criticised for its slow response to the AIDS epidemic, on which Reagan gave his first major speech only in 1987. The Iran–Contra affair (1986–1987), in which officials secretly sold arms to Iran and used the profits to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua against the will of Congress, damaged his standing, though less lastingly than Watergate had damaged Nixon’s.

The War on Drugs

The War on Drugs is the name for the federal campaign against illegal drug use and trafficking that began under Nixon and expanded greatly in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a central example of social policy in the period because it changed the size and character of the American prison system.

• Nixon. In June 1971 Nixon called drug abuse the country’s leading public enemy and increased federal spending on both enforcement and treatment. The Drug Enforcement Administration was created in 1973.

• Reagan. Nancy Reagan led the “Just Say No” campaign aimed at schoolchildren from 1982. After the spread of crack cocaine in the cities, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1986) introduced mandatory minimum sentences and punished offences involving crack 100 times more harshly than those involving the same weight of powder cocaine. The 1988 act created a national “drug czar”.

• George H. W. Bush. In his first televised address from the Oval Office (September 1989), Bush held up a bag of crack and announced more money for police and prisons.

• Clinton. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994) funded 100,000 more police officers and more prisons, introduced a federal “three strikes” life sentence for repeat violent offenders, and banned some assault weapons for ten years.

The result was a rapid growth in imprisonment, often called mass incarceration. The number of prisoners in state and federal prisons rose from about 320,000 in 1980 to about 1.3 million in 2000 (Bureau of Justice Statistics); by the early 2000s the USA had the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. Because crack offences were punished more severely and drug laws were enforced most heavily in poor urban neighbourhoods, African Americans were imprisoned at far higher rates than white Americans, although surveys showed similar levels of drug use.

Judgements differ. Supporters at the time, including many Black community leaders and members of Congress, saw tough laws as a response to real violence in their neighbourhoods, and violent crime did fall steeply in the 1990s. The legal scholar Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow (2010), argues that mass incarceration created a new system of racial control. James Forman Jr., in Locking Up Our Own (2017), accepts the scale of the harm but stresses that Black officials and voters often demanded the policies. By 2010 there was cross-party agreement that sentences had gone too far: the Fair Sentencing Act (2010) reduced the crack–powder ratio to 18 to 1, and the First Step Act (2018), signed by Trump, shortened some federal sentences.

George H. W. Bush, 1989–1993

George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s vice-president, won the 1988 election with the promise “Read my lips: no new taxes.” His domestic record included two important bipartisan laws: the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), which banned discrimination against disabled people in work, transport and public places, and the Clean Air Act Amendments (1990), which used a market in pollution permits to cut the emissions that caused acid rain. He also signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

Faced with a growing deficit and a Democratic Congress, Bush agreed in the budget deal of 1990 to raise some taxes. Conservatives saw this as a betrayal of his pledge. A recession in 1990–1991, with unemployment reaching 7.8 per cent in June 1992, undid the popularity he had won with victory in the Gulf War of 1991. The Los Angeles riots of April–May 1992, after the acquittal of police officers filmed beating Rodney King, and the bitter Senate hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas (1991) showed deep divisions over race and gender. In 1992 the conservative Pat Buchanan challenged Bush for the nomination and told the Republican convention that the country was in a “culture war”. In the election, the independent billionaire Ross Perot took 18.9 per cent of the vote with a campaign against the deficit and free trade, and the Democrat Bill Clinton won with 43 per cent.

Clinton and the transition of the 1990s, 1993–2001

Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas, presented himself as a “New Democrat”: a moderate who accepted the market economy, wanted to cut the deficit and promised to “end welfare as we know it”, while defending the main federal programmes. His approach is often called the Third Way, a term shared with Tony Blair’s Labour Party in Britain.

Successes and defeats, 1993–1994

Clinton’s budget of 1993 raised the top income tax rate to 39.6 per cent and cut spending to reduce the deficit; it passed without a single Republican vote. The Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) gave workers unpaid leave for childbirth or illness, and the Brady Act (1993) introduced background checks on gun buyers. Clinton won approval for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico, which came into force on 1 January 1994, with more Republican than Democratic votes in the House, against the opposition of the unions. His plan for universal health insurance, prepared by a task force led by Hillary Clinton, collapsed in 1994 under opposition from insurers, business and Republicans.

The Republican Revolution and the move to the centre

In the midterm elections of November 1994 the Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich and campaigning on a ten-point “Contract with America”, gained 54 seats and won control of the House for the first time in forty years. Gingrich, as Speaker, tried to force deep spending cuts, and two government shutdowns followed (November 1995 and December 1995–January 1996). The public blamed the Republicans more than the president, and Clinton recovered. In his State of the Union address of January 1996 he declared that “the era of big government is over”, while promising that Americans would not be left to fend for themselves.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (22 August 1996) was the most important result of this move to the centre. It ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the federal right to cash welfare created in 1935, and replaced it with block grants to the states, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), with work requirements and a five-year lifetime limit. The number of people on cash welfare more than halved by 2000. Supporters argued that the law moved people into work during a booming economy; critics, including some of Clinton’s own officials who resigned in protest, argued that it left the poorest families without support when the economy turned down. Clinton was re-elected in 1996. On social issues he also tacked between the parties: his compromise on gay people in the military, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (1993), and his signature on the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), which denied federal recognition to same-sex marriages, disappointed many liberal supporters.

The boom of the 1990s

From March 1991 to March 2001 the US economy grew for 120 months without a recession, the longest expansion up to that time. Unemployment fell to about 4 per cent in 2000 and inflation stayed low. The federal budget moved into surplus in 1998 for the first time since 1969 and stayed in surplus until 2001, helped by the tax rises of 1990 and 1993, a budget agreement with the Republican Congress in 1997, lower defence spending after the Cold War and rising tax revenues from the boom.

The boom rested on new technology, cheap imports, rising productivity and a surge in share prices, above all in internet companies. It also brought problems that became clearer later. The dot-com bubble burst after the technology index NASDAQ peaked on 10 March 2000. Globalisation and NAFTA accelerated the loss of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest, and inequality continued to grow. The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (1999), which removed the barrier between commercial and investment banking set up in 1933, is seen by many economists as one of the steps towards the financial crisis of 2008, though how important it was is debated.

Impeachment and the disputed election of 2000

In January 1998 it was revealed that Clinton had had a sexual relationship with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, which he had denied under oath. The independent counsel Kenneth Starr sent a report to Congress, and on 19 December 1998 the Republican-controlled House impeached Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice, almost entirely on party lines. The Senate acquitted him on 12 February 1999. Clinton’s approval rating stayed above 60 per cent throughout, and the Republicans lost seats in the 1998 midterms, which suggested that most voters saw the impeachment as partisan.

The election of 2000 between Vice-President Al Gore and Governor George W. Bush of Texas came down to Florida, where Bush led by a few hundred votes. After five weeks of recounts and legal challenges, the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore (12 December 2000) stopped the Florida recount by a five-to-four vote, and Bush won the Electoral College by 271 to 266, although Gore had won about 540,000 more votes nationally. The decision left many Democrats convinced that the election had been taken from them.

George W. Bush and the attacks of 11 September 2001

George W. Bush, son of the former president and governor of Texas, came to office promising “compassionate conservatism”: tax cuts combined with federal action on education and social problems. In his first year Congress passed a large tax cut (June 2001), and the No Child Left Behind Act (signed in January 2002), written with the liberal Democrat Edward Kennedy, required states to test pupils every year and hold schools accountable for the results.

The attacks and the national response

On 11 September 2001, nineteen members of the Islamist terrorist network al-Qaeda hijacked four airliners. Two destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one hit the Pentagon near Washington, and the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought the hijackers. The attacks killed 2,977 people, the largest loss of life from a foreign attack on American soil. Bush’s approval rating rose to 90 per cent (Gallup), the highest recorded for any president, and Congress voted almost unanimously to authorise the use of force against those responsible.

Nine days later Bush addressed a joint session of Congress.

The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them. Our war on terror begins with Al Qaida, but it does not end there.

George W. Bush, address to a joint session of Congress, 20 September 2001. The speech had two audiences: Americans, who were told that the conflict was with terrorists and not with Islam, at a time when attacks on Muslim and Arab Americans were rising; and foreign governments, who were warned that harbouring terrorists would make them enemies. By defining the response as an open-ended “war on terror”, the speech prepared the ground for the expansion of executive power that followed.

Security and civil liberties

The attacks led to the largest reorganisation of the federal government since 1947:

• the USA PATRIOT Act (26 October 2001), passed by 98 votes to 1 in the Senate, widened the powers of law enforcement to carry out surveillance, obtain records and share intelligence;

• the Transportation Security Administration (2001) took over airport security, and the Department of Homeland Security (created in November 2002) brought 22 agencies under one cabinet department;

• suspected enemy fighters were held without trial at the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba from January 2002, and the CIA used “enhanced interrogation” methods such as waterboarding, which critics, and later a Senate committee report (2014), described as torture;

• the National Security Agency monitored communications without court warrants, a programme revealed by the New York Times in December 2005.

Supporters argued that these measures were necessary to prevent another attack, and no attack on the scale of 2001 followed. Critics, including civil liberties groups and, from 2004, the Supreme Court, which ruled in several cases that detainees had rights to challenge their detention, argued that they undermined the rule of law. Hate crimes against Muslims recorded by the FBI rose from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001. The domestic debate between security and liberty that the attacks opened continued under Obama and Trump.

The second term: from consensus to division

The unity of 2001 did not last. The invasion of Iraq in March 2003, justified by claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that were never found, divided the country along party lines. The Medicare Modernization Act (2003) added prescription drug cover to Medicare, the largest expansion of the programme since 1965, but Bush’s plan to let workers invest part of their Social Security contributions privately failed in 2005, as did immigration reform in 2006–2007. The slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina, which flooded New Orleans in August 2005 and killed about 1,800 people, many of them poor and Black, badly damaged the administration’s reputation for competence. The Democrats won both houses of Congress in 2006, and by the end of 2008, during the financial crisis, Bush’s approval had fallen to about 25 per cent.

The financial crisis of 2008

The financial crisis of 2008 was the most serious economic crisis in the USA since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Its roots lay in a housing boom. Low interest rates after 2001 and lightly regulated lending allowed millions of people to take out subprime mortgages, home loans to borrowers with poor credit records. Banks bundled these loans into complex securities and sold them around the world, while investment banks borrowed heavily to buy more. When house prices began to fall in 2006, borrowers defaulted, the securities lost value, and no one knew which banks held the losses.

The chain from the housing boom to political backlash shows how the crisis unfolded. The investment bank Bear Stearns had to be rescued in March 2008, and the government took over the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on 7 September. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008 set off a panic in which banks stopped lending to each other. The next day the government rescued the insurance company AIG.

The response

The response was led by the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and, from January 2009, the Obama administration:

• the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), signed on 3 October 2008 after the House had first rejected it, provided up to US$700 billion to support the banks and later the car industry; most of the money lent to banks was eventually repaid;

• the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to almost zero in December 2008 and bought large amounts of bonds to push down long-term rates (quantitative easing);

• the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (February 2009) provided about US$787 billion of tax cuts and spending to support demand;

• General Motors and Chrysler were taken through government-managed bankruptcy in 2009 with federal loans;

• the Dodd–Frank Act (July 2010) tightened the regulation of banks and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The Great Recession that followed lasted officially from December 2007 to June 2009. Unemployment reached 10 per cent in October 2009, millions of families lost their homes, and the recovery that followed was slow. Economists broadly agree that the rescue prevented a depression on the scale of the 1930s, but its political effects were severe. Many voters saw the bailouts as rescuing the bankers who had caused the crisis while ordinary people lost their jobs and homes. On the right, the Tea Party movement, which began in February 2009, attacked bailouts, the stimulus and federal spending; it helped the Republicans gain 63 seats and control of the House in 2010. On the left, Occupy Wall Street (from September 2011) protested against the power of finance and inequality with the slogan “We are the 99 per cent”.

Barack Obama, 2009–2017

Barack Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, won the presidency in November 2008 with 52.9 per cent of the vote and 365 electoral votes, becoming the first African American president. During the primary campaign, when sermons by his former pastor caused controversy, he spoke directly about race.

And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns — this too widens the racial divide and blocks the path to understanding. This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.

Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union”, speech in Philadelphia, 18 March 2008. Obama needed to keep the support of Black voters while reassuring white voters, and the speech treats the grievances of both with sympathy. It is useful evidence of how a candidate saw the racial divide in American politics in 2008; whether his presidency eased or sharpened that divide is one of the main debates about it.

Domestic achievements

With large Democratic majorities in 2009–2010, Obama passed the stimulus, the rescue of the car industry, Dodd–Frank and, above all, the Affordable Care Act (23 March 2010), the largest change to American health care since Medicare. The law required most people to have insurance, expanded Medicaid, set up subsidised insurance markets and banned insurers from refusing people with existing illnesses. The share of Americans without health insurance fell from about 13 per cent in 2013 to 8.8 per cent in 2016 (Census Bureau). The Supreme Court upheld most of the law in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012) but let states refuse the Medicaid expansion, which many Republican-led states did.

Other parts of Obama’s record came through the courts and executive action rather than Congress. In 2012 he used executive action (DACA) to protect from deportation about 700,000 undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the USA as children. The Supreme Court recognised a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). US forces killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011.

Gridlock and opposition

The Affordable Care Act passed without a single Republican vote, and Republicans fought to repeal it for the rest of the decade. After the Republicans won the House in 2010, Obama faced near-constant conflict with Congress: a crisis over raising the federal debt limit in 2011, which led the agency Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the credit rating of the USA for the first time; a 16-day government shutdown in October 2013; and, in 2016, the refusal of the Republican Senate majority under Mitch McConnell to consider his nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, on the grounds that the next president should fill the seat. Both parties increasingly used Senate procedure as a weapon: Democrats ended the filibuster for most nominations in 2013, and Republicans extended this to Supreme Court nominations in 2017.

Obama was re-elected in 2012. His supporters stress the recovery from the recession, health reform and his personal integrity; his critics on the right point to the growth of federal debt and regulation and his use of executive power, and critics on the left to the limits of his reforms and his continued use of drone strikes and surveillance. Opinion on both sides agrees that the partisan divide grew wider during his presidency.

Donald Trump and the growth of political division, 2017–2020

Donald Trump, a New York property developer and television personality who had never held public office, won the Republican nomination in 2016 against a large field of established politicians. He campaigned against illegal immigration, free-trade agreements such as NAFTA, foreign wars and the political “establishment” of both parties. In November 2016 he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by about 2.9 million votes but won the Electoral College by 304 to 227, carrying industrial states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that had voted Democratic for decades.

Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.

Donald J. Trump, Inaugural Address, 20 January 2017. The speech set out Trump’s case that both parties had governed for a Washington elite and neglected industrial workers hurt by globalisation. Supporters heard it as a promise to put ordinary Americans first; critics heard a dark and divisive picture of the country, summed up in the phrase “American carnage” later in the same speech. As a source it shows the populist argument that won him the votes of many former Democrats in the industrial Midwest.

Policies

• Taxes and the economy. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (December 2017) cut the rate of tax on company profits from 35 to 21 per cent and reduced income taxes until 2025. Regulations, especially on energy and the environment, were reduced. Unemployment fell to 3.5 per cent in early 2020, the lowest in fifty years, but the deficit grew.

• Trade. Trump imposed tariffs on steel, aluminium and many Chinese goods and renegotiated NAFTA as the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), which came into force on 1 July 2020.

• Health care. The attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed in the Senate in July 2017, when three Republican senators voted against.

• Immigration. An executive order of January 2017 barred entry from several mainly Muslim countries; after court challenges, a revised version was upheld by the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii (2018). The separation of migrant children from their parents at the Mexican border in 2018 provoked protests across the political spectrum and was reversed. A dispute over funding for a border wall caused the longest government shutdown in US history (35 days, December 2018–January 2019).

• The courts. Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett) and more than 200 other federal judges, giving the Court a 6–3 conservative majority.

• Criminal justice. The First Step Act (2018), passed with support from both parties, reduced some federal prison sentences.

Investigations and impeachment

The special counsel Robert Mueller investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election. His report (2019) found that Russia had interfered in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but did not establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia; it did not reach a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice. In December 2019 the Democratic-controlled House impeached Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, over his request that the president of Ukraine investigate his political rival Joe Biden while military aid was being held back. The Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him on 5 February 2020; only one Republican senator, Mitt Romney, voted to convict on one charge.

2020: pandemic, protest and a disputed election

The COVID-19 pandemic dominated 2020. A national emergency was declared on 13 March, and the CARES Act (27 March) provided about US$2.2 trillion in relief, the largest spending bill in American history. Unemployment rose to 14.7 per cent in April 2020, and about 350,000 Americans died of COVID-19 during the year (CDC). Masks, lockdowns and the administration’s handling of the pandemic became partisan issues. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on 25 May 2020 set off some of the largest protests in American history against police violence and racism.

Joe Biden won the election of November 2020 by 306 electoral votes to 232 and about 7 million votes, on the highest turnout since 1900. Trump refused to accept the result and claimed widespread fraud; more than sixty lawsuits by his campaign and its allies failed in the courts, including before judges he had appointed. The attack on the Capitol by his supporters on 6 January 2021 and his second impeachment fall just after 2020, but they show how deep the division of 2020 had become.

Assessments of Trump are sharply divided along the same lines as American politics. Supporters credit him with tax cuts, deregulation, a strong economy before the pandemic, conservative judges and a tougher line on trade and immigration. Opponents argue that he weakened democratic norms and institutions, encouraged division over race and immigration, and mishandled the pandemic. Because these events are recent and the people involved are still active in politics, a historian must treat them with particular care, relying on documented evidence and attributing judgements to those who make them.

Explaining the growth of political division in the USA

By 2020 the two parties were further apart than at any time since the late nineteenth century. Measures of how members of Congress vote, such as the DW-NOMINATE scores developed by the political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, show the overlap between Democrats and Republicans disappearing between the 1970s and the 2010s. The division also reached voters. A Pew Research Center study of 2014 found that the share of Americans with consistently liberal or consistently conservative views had doubled from 10 to 21 per cent since 1994, and the share of Republicans with a “very unfavorable” view of the Democratic Party had risen from 17 to 43 per cent (and of Democrats about Republicans from 16 to 38 per cent).

The diagram of the causes of division groups the explanations. Each has evidence for it:

• The re-sorting of the parties. Once conservative Southerners had become Republicans and liberal Republicans had disappeared, each party became ideologically uniform, so there were fewer moderates to build compromises.

• Culture wars. From the 1970s abortion, religion, guns, gay rights and later immigration became party issues, and they are harder to compromise on than tax rates.

• Inequality. Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal argue in Polarized America (2006) that polarisation has risen with income inequality since the 1970s.

• Media. The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine (1987), which had required broadcasters to present both sides of controversial issues, allowed the growth of conservative talk radio; Fox News and MSNBC began in 1996; and social media from the late 2000s let people choose news that matched their views.

• Institutions. Most House districts became safe for one party, partly through gerrymandering, so the real contest moved to party primaries, which reward candidates on the wings. Citizens United v. FEC (January 2010) allowed unlimited independent political spending by companies and groups.

• Events. The Clinton impeachment, the disputed election of 2000, the Iraq War, the bailouts of 2008, the Affordable Care Act and the elections of 2008 and 2016 each left one side feeling cheated by the other.

Scholars disagree about where the main responsibility lies. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, in It’s Even Worse Than It Looks (2012), argue that polarisation has been asymmetric, driven mainly by a Republican Party that moved further to the right and rejected compromise. Others point to the Democrats’ own move to the left on social issues and argue that both sides used new procedural weapons. Morris Fiorina, in Culture War? (2005), argues that ordinary voters were less divided than politicians and activists, though the Pew data of 2014 suggest the gap among voters widened after he wrote.

The Quiet Revolution in Quebec, 1960–1966

The Quiet Revolution (Révolution tranquille) is the name for the rapid reform of Quebec’s government, economy and society under the Liberal government of Jean Lesage (1960–1966) and the changes in culture and identity that went with it. It was “quiet” because it came through elections and laws rather than violence, but it transformed the province and, through the nationalism it produced, the politics of the whole of Canada.

Quebec before 1960

From 1944 to 1959 Quebec was governed by Maurice Duplessis and his Union Nationale party. Duplessis defended provincial autonomy against Ottawa and governed through a close alliance with the Catholic Church, which ran most of Quebec’s schools, hospitals and welfare services. His government was hostile to trade unions, rewarded loyal areas with roads and contracts, and favoured the countryside over the growing cities. His opponents called the period the Grande Noirceur (“Great Darkness”).

Beneath this political stability, Quebec had already changed. Most French-speaking Quebecers lived in towns and worked in industry, and post-war prosperity, television and wider education were creating a new francophone middle class. Yet the economy was largely owned and managed by English-speaking Canadians and Americans: in Montreal the language of business and promotion was English. The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism later reported that in 1961 men of French origin in Quebec earned less on average than men of most other ethnic origins in the province.

Opposition grew in the 1950s. The Asbestos Strike of 1949, a long and violent strike by miners against American-owned companies, which Duplessis’s police broke up, united unions, journalists and reform-minded Catholics against the government. Artists attacked the Church’s cultural control in the manifesto Refus global (1948), and the journal Cité libre (founded in 1950 by Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Gérard Pelletier) argued for a secular, liberal and democratic Quebec. A younger generation of nationalist intellectuals argued instead that French Canadians needed a modern Quebec state to defend their collective interests.

The diagram of causes shows how these factors combined. Duplessis died in September 1959, and his successor, Paul Sauvé, promised change with the single word Désormais (“From now on”) but died after only four months. In June 1960 Jean Lesage’s Liberals won the provincial election with the slogan “Il faut que ça change” (“Things must change”).

The reforms of the Lesage government

Lesage’s “équipe du tonnerre” (“team of thunder”) used the Quebec state to modernise the province and to give French-speaking Quebecers control of their economy:

Lesage called a snap election in November 1962 on the single issue of nationalising electricity, with the slogan “Maîtres chez nous” (“Masters in our own house”).

Effects of the Quiet Revolution

The effects reached far beyond government. Catholic practice declined steeply: Quebec went from one of the most church-going societies in the Western world to one of the least within a generation, and Quebec’s birth rate, once among the highest in the Western world, fell to among the lowest. Francophones moved into senior positions in business and government, and a francophone business class, later called Québec Inc., grew with the support of Hydro-Québec and the Caisse. People increasingly described themselves as Québécois rather than as French Canadians, which showed a new identity tied to the territory and state of Quebec rather than to French speakers across Canada.

The Quiet Revolution also raised a political question that dominated the next forty years: if Quebec was the homeland of a nation, how much power should it have, and should it remain in Canada at all? The Liberals lost the 1966 election to the Union Nationale under Daniel Johnson, whose slogan was “Égalité ou indépendance” (“Equality or independence”). In July 1967 the French president, Charles de Gaulle, on a visit to Montreal during the centenary of Canadian Confederation, ended a speech with the cry “Vive le Québec libre!” (“Long live free Quebec!”), the slogan of the separatists, which angered the federal government.

Canada under Lester Pearson, 1963–1968

Lester B. Pearson, a former diplomat who had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for his role in the Suez crisis, led the Liberals to power in April 1963, defeating John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives. He never won a majority: both his governments (1963–1965 and 1965–1968) were minorities that relied on the support of the New Democratic Party (NDP), a social democratic party. This pressure from the left helps explain why his governments created so much of the Canadian welfare state.

Social policy

• The Canada Pension Plan (1965). A contributory pension for all workers. Quebec was allowed to opt out and run its own Quebec Pension Plan, an example of Pearson’s cooperative federalism.

• Medicare. Saskatchewan’s NDP government under Tommy Douglas had introduced public medical insurance in 1962 despite a strike by doctors. After a royal commission recommended a national scheme, the Medical Care Act (1966) paid half the cost of provincial plans that met national standards. It came into effect on 1 July 1968, and by 1972 every province had joined. Medicare (Canada) became one of the strongest symbols of Canadian identity.

• The Canada Assistance Plan (1966) shared the cost of provincial welfare, and Canada Student Loans began in 1964.

• Immigration. A points system (1967) selected immigrants by education, skills and language instead of national origin, ending the preference for Europeans.

National identity and bilingualism

After a bitter debate in Parliament in 1964, Canada adopted the maple leaf flag, raised for the first time on 15 February 1965, in place of the Red Ensign, which carried the British Union Jack. Pearson saw a distinctive flag as a way to unite English and French Canadians. In 1963 he appointed the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which reported that Canada was passing through the greatest crisis in its history and recommended that English and French have equal status in federal institutions. Other measures included the Auto Pact with the USA (January 1965), which created free trade in cars and parts and greatly expanded car manufacturing in Ontario, the unification of the armed forces (1968) and the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (1967). The country celebrated its centenary in 1967 with the world’s fair, Expo 67, in Montreal.

Pearson’s governments were also troubled by scandals and by his weak control of Parliament, but historians generally rate his record highly: in five years of minority government he laid the foundations of the welfare state and the bilingual national identity that Trudeau developed.

Pierre Trudeau and the “just society”, 1968–1979

Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a Montreal law professor and opponent of Duplessis, entered federal politics in 1965 as one of three Quebec reformers recruited by Pearson. As justice minister he introduced, in December 1967, a large bill to reform the Criminal Code, defending it with the words “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation”, a phrase he borrowed from a newspaper editorial. He won the Liberal leadership in April 1968 and, amid an enthusiasm for the young, witty and modern-seeming leader that the press called “Trudeaumania”, a majority in the election of June 1968.

Trudeau’s political philosophy rested on the rights of the individual and a strong federal government. He opposed Quebec nationalism, which he saw as inward-looking and dangerous, and believed that French Canadians would be best protected by equal language rights across the whole country. His slogan was a “just society”.

Reforms of the first government

• The Criminal Law Amendment Act (1969) decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults in private, allowed abortion where a hospital committee judged the woman’s life or health to be in danger, and legalised the sale of contraceptives.

• The Official Languages Act (1969) made English and French the official languages of the federal government, with the right to federal services in either language.

• Multiculturalism (8 October 1971). Trudeau announced a policy of “multiculturalism within a bilingual framework”, which recognised and funded the cultures of Canadians of neither British nor French origin, many of whom had felt left out of the “bicultural” vision of the 1960s.

• The 1969 White Paper on Indian policy proposed to abolish the Indian Act and the separate legal status of First Nations people in the name of equality. First Nations leaders rejected it as assimilation; the Indian Association of Alberta replied with Citizens Plus (1970), often called the “Red Paper”, and the government withdrew the proposal in 1971. The conflict helped launch modern Indigenous political organisation in Canada.

Trudeau’s majority was cut to a minority in 1972, which made him dependent on the NDP. The government created Petro-Canada (1975), a state oil company, and the Foreign Investment Review Agency (1973), which screened foreign takeovers of Canadian businesses, both reflecting an economic nationalism aimed at limiting American control of the economy. Trudeau won a majority again in 1974 after campaigning against the Conservatives’ plan for wage and price controls, and then introduced such controls himself in October 1975 (the Anti-Inflation Board, 1975–1978) as inflation passed 10 per cent. Stagflation, rising deficits and his reputation for arrogance cost him the election of May 1979.

The FLQ and the October Crisis, 1963–1970

A small minority of Quebec nationalists turned to violence. The Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) was a loose network of underground cells that combined the aim of an independent Quebec with Marxist ideas of national liberation drawn from the anti-colonial struggles in Algeria and Cuba. From 1963 its members carried out bombings and armed robberies against federal buildings, army depots, mailboxes in wealthy English-speaking areas and, in February 1969, the Montreal Stock Exchange. Counts differ, from about 160 to more than 200 violent incidents by 1970, and at least five people were killed.

The vertical timeline of the October Crisis shows its sequence. On 5 October 1970 an FLQ cell kidnapped the British trade commissioner James Cross; on 10 October another cell kidnapped Pierre Laporte, the Quebec minister of labour. Among the kidnappers’ demands was the broadcast of their manifesto, which Radio-Canada read on 8 October.

The Front de Libération du Québec wants total independence for Quebeckers; it wants to see them united in a free society, a society purged for good of its gang of rapacious sharks, the big bosses who dish out patronage and their henchmen, who have turned Quebec into a private preserve of cheap labour and unscrupulous exploitation.

Front de libération du Québec, manifesto broadcast on Radio-Canada, 8 October 1970 (English translation by James Boake, in Marcel Rioux, Quebec in Question, 1971). The manifesto was written to win sympathy from working-class Quebecers, and it combines nationalism with attacks on English-speaking business, the Church and the Liberal government elected in April 1970. Its language shows why some students and workers expressed sympathy at first; its demand that the kidnapping be rewarded shows the method that most Quebecers rejected after Laporte’s death.

The War Measures Act

On 15 October the Quebec government of Robert Bourassa and the mayor of Montreal asked for federal help, warning of an “apprehended insurrection”. Troops had already been sent to Ottawa and were now deployed in Montreal and Quebec City. Early on 16 October the federal government proclaimed the War Measures Act, the only time it was used in peacetime. The FLQ was outlawed, membership became a crime, and police could search and arrest without warrant. Nearly 500 people were detained, most of them artists, trade unionists, journalists and supporters of the Parti Québécois with no connection to terrorism; the great majority were released without charge. Asked by a reporter on 13 October how far he would go, Trudeau had replied: “Well, just watch me.”

On 17 October Laporte was found dead. Police located Cross on 3 December; his kidnappers were allowed to fly to Cuba in exchange for his release. Laporte’s kidnappers were arrested at the end of December and convicted.

Assessing the October Crisis

At the time the government’s action was popular. Opinion polls showed large majorities in favour, in Quebec as well as in English Canada, and the House of Commons approved it with only the New Democrats, led by Tommy Douglas, voting against. Douglas argued that the government was “using a sledgehammer to crack a peanut”. René Lévesque, the newspaper editor Claude Ryan and civil liberties groups condemned the arrests.

Later evidence strengthened the critics. No insurrection was found, and the FLQ turned out to be a few dozen people. A federal inquiry (the McDonald Commission, 1977–1981) revealed that the RCMP security service had itself carried out illegal acts against Quebec separatists in the following years, including break-ins and the theft of the Parti Québécois membership list. Defenders of Trudeau answer that the government had to act on what it knew in October 1970, when two hostages were held, and that the crisis ended FLQ terrorism.

Its most important consequence was political: the murder of Laporte discredited violence, and almost all supporters of independence turned to the democratic Parti Québécois. Separatism became a movement that sought to win through elections and referendums.

Quebec separatism: the Parti Québécois and the 1980 referendum

Separatist groups had appeared at the start of the Quiet Revolution, notably the Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale (RIN), founded in 1960. René Lévesque, the minister who had nationalised Hydro-Québec, left the Liberal Party in 1967 and founded the Parti Québécois (PQ) in October 1968. Its aim was sovereignty-association: political independence for Quebec combined with an economic partnership, including a common currency, with the rest of Canada. The PQ won the provincial election of 15 November 1976, promising good government and a referendum on sovereignty before any move to independence.

Language became the central issue of Quebec politics in the 1970s, as francophones feared that immigrants were choosing English. Bourassa’s Liberal government had already made French the official language of Quebec in 1974 (Bill 22). The PQ’s most lasting law was the Charter of the French Language (Bill 101, 26 August 1977). It made French the only official language of Quebec, required French in commercial signs and in the workplace of larger firms, and required the children of most immigrants to attend French-language schools. The law secured the position of French in Montreal, but it angered many anglophones, tens of thousands of whom left the province, and several large companies moved their head offices to Toronto.

The referendum of 20 May 1980 asked Quebecers to give the government a mandate to negotiate sovereignty-association. Trudeau campaigned for the “No” side and promised that a No vote would lead to a renewed federalism. The result was No 59.6 per cent, Yes 40.4 per cent. Francophones were roughly evenly divided: estimates put their Yes vote at about 48 to 50 per cent, but a secret ballot allows no exact figure.

Data: Directeur général des élections du Québec. The table of the two referendums shows how far support for sovereignty grew between 1980 and 1995, after the failure of the constitutional negotiations.

Clark, the second Trudeau government and patriation, 1979–1984

Joe Clark, at 39 the youngest prime minister in Canadian history, led a Progressive Conservative minority government from June 1979. It lasted only nine months: on 13 December 1979 the government lost a vote on its budget, which included a tax of 18 cents a gallon on petrol, and in the election of February 1980 Trudeau returned with a majority.

The National Energy Program

The National Energy Program (NEP) of October 1980 aimed to increase Canadian ownership of the oil industry, keep domestic oil prices below world prices, and give Ottawa a larger share of oil revenues. Alberta, which produced most of Canada’s oil, saw it as a federal raid on provincial resources; its premier, Peter Lougheed, cut oil shipments to the rest of Canada until a deal was reached in 1981. When world oil prices fell, the NEP’s projections collapsed. It left a deep sense of Western alienation, the belief that federal governments, elected mainly by Ontario and Quebec, ignored the interests of the West, which later fed the rise of the Reform Party.

Patriation and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Until 1982, Canada’s constitution, the British North America Act of 1867, was a British law that could be amended only by the British Parliament. After the 1980 referendum Trudeau set out to patriate it, bringing it under Canadian control, with a charter of rights and an amending formula. Eight provinces opposed his plan. In September 1981 the Supreme Court ruled that Ottawa could legally proceed alone but that convention required “substantial” provincial consent. In a final round of talks on the night of 4–5 November 1981, the federal government reached an agreement with nine provinces, while Quebec’s premier Lévesque was absent; Quebec nationalists call it the “night of the long knives”.

The Constitution Act, 1982, proclaimed by Queen Elizabeth II in Ottawa on 17 April 1982, included:

• the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which protected fundamental freedoms, democratic, legal and equality rights, and minority-language education rights, and allowed courts to strike down laws that broke them;

• section 33, the notwithstanding clause, which lets Parliament or a provincial legislature override some Charter rights for five years at a time, a compromise demanded by the provinces;

• section 35, which recognised and affirmed the existing Aboriginal and treaty rights of the Indigenous peoples of Canada;

• a formula for amending the constitution in Canada.

The Charter changed Canadian politics by giving the courts a much larger role in deciding questions of rights, and it became, with medicare, one of the most popular symbols of national identity outside Quebec. Quebec’s National Assembly refused to endorse the new constitution, and in 1982 the Supreme Court ruled that Quebec had no veto over it. The province has never formally signed it. For Trudeau, patriation completed a vision of a bilingual Canada of equal citizens; for many Quebec nationalists it was a betrayal of the promise of renewed federalism made in 1980.

Trudeau’s last years in office were marked by recession, unemployment above 11 per cent and large deficits. He retired in 1984; his successor John Turner held office for less than three months before losing the election of September 1984.

Brian Mulroney and the collapse of the Progressive Conservative Party, 1984–1993

Brian Mulroney, a bilingual business lawyer from Baie-Comeau in Quebec, led the Progressive Conservatives to victory in September 1984 with 211 of 282 seats, the largest number any party had ever won. His coalition joined three groups that did not usually vote together: conservatives in the West, voters in Ontario and the Atlantic provinces, and Quebec nationalists, many of them former supporters of the Parti Québécois, attracted by his promise to bring Quebec into the constitution “with honour and enthusiasm”.

Economic policy: free trade, privatisation and the GST

Like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Mulroney sought to reduce the role of the state in the economy. He abolished the National Energy Program and the Foreign Investment Review Agency, and privatised many state companies, including Air Canada (1988–1989) and, in part, Petro-Canada.

His most important economic decision was the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement (FTA), signed in January 1988, which removed most tariffs between the two countries. The election of November 1988 was fought almost entirely on free trade: the Liberals under John Turner and the NDP warned that it would destroy Canadian jobs, social programmes and independence. Mulroney won 169 seats with 43 per cent of the vote, although a majority of voters supported parties opposed to the agreement. The FTA came into force on 1 January 1989 and was extended to Mexico through NAFTA in 1994.

To reduce the deficit, Mulroney replaced a hidden federal tax on manufacturers with the Goods and Services Tax (GST), a 7 per cent tax on most purchases, from 1 January 1991. It was highly unpopular, and Mulroney had to use a rarely used power to appoint eight extra senators to force it through the Liberal-dominated Senate. Its introduction coincided with a severe recession (1990–1992), in which unemployment rose above 11 per cent and the deficit grew rather than fell.

The constitution: Meech Lake and Charlottetown

Mulroney tried to bring Quebec into the constitution. The Meech Lake Accord, agreed by all ten premiers in 1987, met Quebec’s five conditions: recognition of Quebec as a “distinct society”, a veto over constitutional amendments, a role in appointing Supreme Court judges, more power over immigration, and the right to opt out of new federal programmes with compensation.

The accord needed the approval of every provincial legislature within three years. Opposition grew, led by Pierre Trudeau, who argued that it would weaken the federal government and create special status for Quebec; by Indigenous leaders and women’s groups, who had been left out; and by English Canadians angered when Quebec’s Liberal premier Robert Bourassa used the notwithstanding clause in 1988 to keep a ban on English on outdoor commercial signs. In June 1990 the accord died when Elijah Harper, a Cree member of the Manitoba legislature, blocked a vote there, and Newfoundland’s premier Clyde Wells cancelled a vote in his province.

The failure was a turning point. Support for sovereignty in Quebec rose sharply. Lucien Bouchard, Mulroney’s environment minister and close friend, resigned and, with several Conservative and Liberal MPs from Quebec, founded the Bloc Québécois, a sovereigntist party in the federal Parliament. In the summer of 1990 the Oka Crisis, a 78-day armed stand-off between Mohawk protesters, Quebec police and the army over a planned golf course on land the Mohawk claimed, showed that Indigenous grievances could not be left out of national politics.

A second attempt, the Charlottetown Accord (August 1992), tried to satisfy everyone: it included the distinct society clause, an elected Senate for the West, recognition of an Indigenous right to self-government and other changes. In a national referendum on 26 October 1992 it was rejected by 54.3 per cent of voters, including majorities in Quebec, which thought it gave too little, and in the four western provinces, which thought it gave Quebec too much.

The chain of constitutional events from 1980 to 1995 shows how each failure fed the next. The process also destroyed the coalition that had elected Mulroney, whose approval rating fell to among the lowest recorded for a Canadian prime minister.

The election of 1993

Mulroney resigned in 1993. Kim Campbell, the first woman to be prime minister, took office in June but led a campaign weakened by errors, including an advertisement that appeared to mock the facial paralysis of the Liberal leader Jean Chrétien, which had to be withdrawn. In the election of 25 October 1993 the Progressive Conservatives fell from 169 seats to 2, the worst defeat of a governing party in Canadian history.

The bar chart of the 1993 vote shows why the result was so extreme. The Progressive Conservatives still won 16 per cent of the national vote, but under the single-member, first-past-the-post system their support was spread too thinly to win seats. Their voters had split three ways: Quebec nationalists went to the Bloc Québécois, which won 54 seats and became the Official Opposition; Western conservatives went to the Reform Party of Preston Manning, founded in 1987, which won 52 seats; and many moderate voters in Ontario and the East went to Chrétien’s Liberals.

Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, 1993–2006

Jean Chrétien, a veteran Liberal minister from Quebec who had served under Pearson and Trudeau, won three majority governments (1993, 1997 and 2000), helped by the division of the opposition between the Bloc, Reform and the remains of the Progressive Conservatives.

Eliminating the deficit

By 1993–1994 the federal deficit was about C$42 billion, around 6 per cent of the economy, and the debt was rising fast. The finance minister, Paul Martin, made deficit reduction his priority. His budget of February 1995 made the deepest spending cuts in decades: tens of thousands of federal public service jobs were cut, unemployment insurance was tightened, and transfers to the provinces for health, education and welfare were reduced and combined into a single block grant. The federal budget moved into surplus in 1997–1998, the first since 1969–1970, and stayed in surplus for the next decade. The cost fell partly on the provinces, which cut hospitals and services in the late 1990s.

Chrétien had promised to renegotiate NAFTA and replace the GST, but kept both. He also created a national firearms registry (1995), which was popular in the cities but deeply resented in rural and Western Canada, ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change (2002), and refused to send Canadian forces to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

The 1995 referendum

The Parti Québécois returned to power in Quebec in 1994 under Jacques Parizeau and held a second referendum on 30 October 1995. When Lucien Bouchard, the popular leader of the Bloc, took over the Yes campaign, support for sovereignty surged. On the eve of the vote, tens of thousands of Canadians from outside Quebec gathered at a unity rally in Montreal. The result was the closest possible: 50.58 per cent No to 49.42 per cent Yes, a margin of about 54,000 votes, on a turnout of 93.5 per cent. About 60 per cent of francophones voted Yes. Parizeau, in his speech on the night, blamed the defeat on money and the votes of ethnic minorities, a remark that was widely condemned, and announced his resignation the next day.

YouTube

The near-defeat changed federal policy. Ottawa asked the Supreme Court whether Quebec could leave Canada on its own. In the Reference re Secession of Quebec (August 1998), the Court ruled that Quebec had no right to secede unilaterally, but that if a clear majority of Quebecers voted for independence on a clear question, the rest of Canada would have a duty to negotiate. The Clarity Act (2000) then gave the House of Commons the power to decide whether a future referendum question and majority were clear. After 1995, support for sovereignty declined, though the Bloc Québécois continued to win most Quebec seats in Ottawa until 2011.

The sponsorship scandal and Paul Martin

After the referendum the federal government spent heavily on advertising and events in Quebec to promote Canadian unity. In February 2004 the Auditor General, Sheila Fraser, reported that about C$100 million of this sponsorship programme had gone in fees and commissions to advertising firms, many with Liberal connections, for little or no work. A public inquiry led by Justice John Gomery (2004–2006) found that some of the money had been returned to the Liberal Party in Quebec.

Paul Martin, who had finally pushed Chrétien into retirement, became prime minister in December 2003, but the scandal reduced the Liberals to a minority in June 2004. His government agreed a ten-year health funding deal with the provinces (2004), passed the Civil Marriage Act (July 2005), which made Canada one of the first countries to legalise same-sex marriage nationally, and negotiated the Kelowna Accord (November 2005), a C$5 billion plan with Indigenous leaders and the provinces to improve education, housing and health. The opposition parties brought the government down in November 2005, and the Kelowna Accord was never implemented.

The emergence of the Conservative Party of Canada, 1987–2003

After 1993 the Canadian right was divided between Reform, strong in the West, and the Progressive Conservatives, who kept support in Ontario and the Atlantic provinces. Neither could defeat the Liberals while the other split the vote. Reform tried to broaden its appeal by becoming the Canadian Alliance in 2000, but under Stockwell Day it again won few seats east of Manitoba in the election of that year.

The diagram of the Canadian right shows how the parties came back together. Stephen Harper, a Calgary economist who had been one of Reform’s founders, became leader of the Alliance in 2002. He and the Progressive Conservative leader, Peter MacKay, agreed to merge their parties in October 2003, and the Conservative Party of Canada was founded on 7 December 2003. Harper was elected its leader in March 2004. Some Progressive Conservatives, including Joe Clark, refused to join a party they saw as dominated by Reform’s social conservatism.

Stephen Harper, 2006–2015

Harper won a minority government in January 2006, after the sponsorship scandal, and governed with two minorities (2006 and 2008) before winning a majority in May 2011. He moved cautiously, aiming to make the Conservatives Canada’s natural governing party by appealing to suburban, immigrant and rural voters with targeted tax cuts and a firm line on crime.

• Taxes. The GST was cut from 7 to 6 per cent (2006) and then 5 per cent (2008). A Universal Child Care Benefit paid families C$100 a month for each child under six, instead of the national childcare system the Liberals had planned.

• Accountability. The Federal Accountability Act (2006) responded to the sponsorship scandal by tightening rules on lobbying and political donations.

• Quebec. In November 2006 the House of Commons passed Harper’s motion recognising that “the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada”.

• Crime and security. Longer sentences, including mandatory minimums; the abolition of the long-gun registry (2012); and the Anti-terrorism Act (2015, Bill C-51), which gave the security services new powers after an attack on Parliament Hill in October 2014.

• Energy and environment. Strong support for the oil sands of Alberta and new pipelines; withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol (December 2011).

Harper’s critics accused him of concentrating power in the Prime Minister’s Office, controlling the communications of government scientists, using huge omnibus bills that changed dozens of laws at once, and treating Parliament with contempt. In March 2011 his government became the first in Canadian history to be found in contempt of Parliament, for refusing to disclose the costs of its crime and defence policies. His supporters credit him with steady economic management and with uniting the right into a party that could govern.

The residential schools apology

On 11 June 2008 Harper made a formal apology in the House of Commons, on behalf of the government, to the former students of the Indian residential schools.

Two primary objectives of the Residential Schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture. These objectives were based on the assumption aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal.

Stephen Harper, Statement of Apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools, House of Commons, 11 June 2008. The apology was delivered in the presence of Indigenous leaders, who were invited to reply on the floor of the House, and it followed the settlement of a class action by survivors, which had legal as well as moral weight. As a source it shows the government’s official acknowledgement of the purpose of the schools; it says less about the wider policies of which they were a part, which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission later examined.

Canada and the 2008 financial crisis

The global financial crisis reached Canada in the autumn of 2008, just after Harper had won a second minority on 14 October. No Canadian bank failed or needed a government bailout, and the World Economic Forum rated Canada’s banking system the soundest in the world from 2008. Historians and economists explain this by structural differences built up over decades: a few large, closely supervised banks; stricter limits on how much banks could borrow against their capital; mortgage insurance required for buyers with small deposits; and a much smaller market in subprime loans.

The political crisis came first. In November 2008 the government’s economic statement offered no stimulus and proposed to end public funding of political parties. The Liberals and the NDP agreed to form a coalition with the support of the Bloc Québécois and to defeat the government. On 4 December Harper persuaded the Governor General to prorogue (suspend) Parliament, avoiding the vote, and returned in January 2009 with a budget, the Economic Action Plan, that provided about C$40 billion of stimulus over two years. The government also bought up to C$125 billion of insured mortgages from the banks to keep credit flowing, and with Ontario lent about C$13.7 billion to General Motors and Chrysler.

Canada’s recession was shorter and milder than that of the USA: unemployment peaked at 8.7 per cent in August 2009, compared with 10 per cent in the USA, and the federal deficit, about C$56 billion in 2009–2010, was eliminated by 2015. The opposition parties nonetheless brought down the government in March 2011, and Harper won a majority in May. The Liberals, reduced to 34 seats, came third for the first time, behind the NDP under Jack Layton, whose “orange wave” swept Quebec and nearly wiped out the Bloc Québécois.

The comparison of the crisis in the two countries shows that the same global shock had very different domestic effects. In the USA it became a crisis of the banking system and of trust in government; in Canada it was mainly a recession imported through trade, and it strengthened rather than weakened the governing party.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2008–2015

From the 1880s to the 1990s, the federal government funded a system of residential schools for Indigenous children, run mostly by the Catholic, Anglican, United and Presbyterian churches. At least 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children attended them; many were taken from their families by force, punished for speaking their languages, and suffered neglect and physical and sexual abuse. The last federally funded school closed in 1996.

Thousands of former students sued the government and the churches. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (in effect from 2007), the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history, provided compensation and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which began work in June 2008. Chaired from 2009 by Justice Murray Sinclair, the first Indigenous judge in Manitoba, it travelled across the country for six years, received more than 6,750 statements from survivors and others, and collected millions of documents. Its summary report of June 2015 reached a stark conclusion.

The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as “cultural genocide.”

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report (2015), introduction. The “policy” referred to is the aim, which the Commission found in Canada’s Aboriginal policy for over a century, of eliminating Indigenous governments and rights and causing Indigenous peoples to cease to exist as distinct peoples. The Commission explained that it meant the destruction of the structures and practices that allow a group to continue as a group. Its judgement rests on survivors’ testimony and government and church records, and it was written to move a national audience to action; some commentators accepted the term, while others argued that “cultural genocide” blurred the meaning of genocide or did not go far enough.

The Commission’s final report (December 2015) made 94 Calls to Action to governments, churches, schools, the media and others, on child welfare, education, language and culture, health, justice and the commemoration of the schools. It identified the deaths of more than 3,200 children in the schools, a figure that later research by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, set up at the University of Manitoba in 2015, has raised.

The TRC is significant as one of the most detailed official investigations of a colonial policy by any settler state, and it changed public understanding of Canadian history. Its effects on policy were slower. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals promised in 2015 to implement all 94 Calls to Action, but the Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led research centre, found that only nine had been completed by the end of 2019. The commission is also part of the story of Indigenous movements in the Americas, a separate regional study, where it is seen as an achievement of survivors’ activism.

Justin Trudeau, 2015–2020

Justin Trudeau, the son of Pierre Trudeau, led the Liberals from third place to a majority in October 2015, promising “real change”: modest deficits to pay for investment, a new relationship with Indigenous peoples, action on climate change and a more open style of government. His first cabinet had equal numbers of women and men.

• Social policy. The Canada Child Benefit (2016) replaced earlier payments with a larger, income-tested monthly payment, and child poverty fell in the following years. Medical assistance in dying was legalised in June 2016, following a Supreme Court ruling. Recreational cannabis was legalised on 17 October 2018.

• Climate and energy. A national price on carbon was imposed from 2019 on provinces without their own, against strong opposition from several provincial governments. At the same time the government bought the Trans Mountain oil pipeline in 2018 to ensure its expansion, which angered environmentalists and some Indigenous nations.

• Indigenous relations. The government set up a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (2016–2019), whose final report described the violence as genocide, and increased spending on Indigenous services; but disputes such as the Wet’suwet’en protests and rail blockades against a gas pipeline in early 2020 showed continuing conflict.

• Trade. After Trump threatened to end NAFTA, Canada negotiated the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement (CUSMA, the Canadian name for USMCA), in force from 1 July 2020.

Trudeau dropped his promise to reform the electoral system in 2017. In August 2019 the federal Ethics Commissioner found that he had broken the Conflict of Interest Act by improperly pressuring his justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, the first Indigenous person in that office, to halt the criminal prosecution of the Quebec engineering company SNC-Lavalin; Trudeau said he had acted to protect jobs. In the election of October 2019 the Liberals were reduced to a minority, winning fewer votes than the Conservatives but more seats.

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 led to the largest peacetime spending in Canadian history, including the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, which paid C$2,000 a month to millions of people who had lost income. Supporters credit the response with protecting incomes; critics point to the deficit of about C$328 billion in 2020–2021 and to the WE Charity affair, in which a contract went to a charity with links to Trudeau’s family, after which he prorogued Parliament in August 2020. As with Trump, judgements of these years are still being formed and remain politically contested.

Comparing political development in the USA and Canada

The two countries shared a continent, an economy closely linked by the Auto Pact, the FTA and NAFTA, and many of the same pressures. The comparison table sets out how their politics developed.

The deepest difference is in what divided each country. American politics after 1960 became a contest over the size and purpose of government and over cultural values, fought between two national parties. Canadian politics turned on the relationship between the federal government, the provinces and the two linguistic communities, and its party system broke apart when that relationship failed. Both countries moved towards the market after 1980, but Canada kept a more extensive welfare state, above all in health care.

Perspectives and debates

Because the period reaches into the recent past, some of its debates are among historians and others among political scientists, economists and contemporaries. The main interpretations are set out by topic.

Liberalism in the 1960s

These views can be weighed against the evidence of results. The fall in poverty, especially among the elderly, and the lasting popularity of Medicare support Dallek’s positive view; the white backlash and the collapse of the Democratic coalition by 1968 support Matusow’s. Murray’s argument, influential in the 1980s and 1990s, is disputed by researchers who point out that poverty rose after 1979 as welfare benefits were being cut, not expanded.

Nixon and Watergate

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (The Imperial Presidency, 1973) and Stanley Kutler (The Wars of Watergate, 1990) see Watergate as the result of a presidency that had escaped constitutional limits and of Nixon’s own suspicious and vindictive character; for Kutler, the tapes show a president who used the power of the state against his enemies. Joan Hoff (Nixon Reconsidered, 1994) argues that the focus on Watergate has hidden a significant domestic record in environmental policy, welfare reform and civil rights, more liberal than that of his successors. Both views can be accepted: Nixon’s domestic achievements were real, and Watergate was also a real abuse of power whose consequences outlasted them.

Reagan and the conservative era

Sean Wilentz (The Age of Reagan, 2008), a historian sympathetic to the Democrats, nonetheless calls the period 1974–2008 the “age of Reagan”, arguing that Reagan was the dominant political figure of a conservative era that set the terms for his successors, including Clinton. Gil Troy (Morning in America, 2005) stresses that Reagan restored national confidence after the 1970s. Critics such as the economist Paul Krugman (The Conscience of a Liberal, 2007) argue that the policies of the Reagan era, especially tax cuts and the weakening of unions, were a main cause of the sharp rise in inequality. Economists continue to debate how much of the recovery after 1982 came from the tax cuts and how much from Volcker’s defeat of inflation and falling oil prices.

Political division since the 1990s

Each view rests on different evidence: voting records in Congress (McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal), surveys of voters’ policy views (Fiorina), the behaviour of party leaders in Congress (Mann and Ornstein). Later survey data, such as Pew’s, suggest that ordinary voters became more divided after 2005, which weakens Fiorina’s case for the later part of the period.

The Quiet Revolution

An older interpretation, associated with the reformers of the 1960s themselves and with Kenneth McRoberts and Dale Posgate (Quebec: Social Change and Political Crisis, 1976), presents the Quiet Revolution as a sharp break: a new francophone middle class used the state to modernise a society held back by the Church and Duplessis. Revisionist historians, including Paul-André Linteau and his colleagues (Histoire du Québec contemporain), argue that Quebec had been modernising since the late nineteenth century and was a “normal” North American society, so the 1960s were the political catching-up of long social change. Michael Behiels (Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1985) traces the ideas of the 1960s, both liberal and neo-nationalist, to critics of Duplessis in the 1940s and 1950s. Together the revisionists stress continuity, while the older view stresses change; most historians accept that the role of the state and the Church changed very quickly after 1960, even if society had changed earlier.

Trudeau, Mulroney and national unity

Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson (Trudeau and Our Times, 1990 and 1994) present Trudeau as a leader who reshaped Canada according to a coherent vision of individual rights and bilingual federalism. Kenneth McRoberts (Misconceiving Canada, 1997) argues that this vision, by refusing to recognise Quebec as a distinct nation, alienated Quebecers and made the crises of 1990 and 1995 worse. Defenders of Trudeau answer that the Charter became deeply popular, that the 1980 referendum was won, and that Mulroney’s attempts to accommodate Quebec in 1987–1992 produced the very crisis McRoberts describes. On the collapse of 1993, R. Kenneth Carty, William Cross and Lisa Young (Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics, 2000) argue that it marked the end of a national party system in which the big parties brokered compromises between regions, and the start of one in which parties spoke for particular regions.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: the New Frontier and the Great Society

Paper 3: Watergate

This question asks you to weigh one event against other causes of a broad change.

Paper 3: the collapse of the Progressive Conservatives

A factor question that requires a full essay plan.

Paper 3: the Quiet Revolution and Canadian unity

This question asks you to test a claim about effects across different groups and periods.

Paper 3: political division in the USA

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain how the presidential and parliamentary systems shaped what leaders in the USA and Canada could achieve.

• To do:

  I can describe the aims and achievements of the New Frontier and explain why much of it failed in Congress.

• To do:

  I can explain the main laws of the Great Society and weigh evidence for its success and failure, using the poverty statistics.

• To do:

  I can explain the divisions within the Democratic and Republican parties in the 1960s and 1970s and how they changed the results of elections.

• To do:

  I can describe Nixon’s domestic policies, including New Federalism, the environment and the economic measures of 1971.

• To do:

  I can explain the course of the Watergate scandal, why Nixon resigned, and the arguments for and against Ford’s pardon.

• To do:

  I can explain the effects of Watergate on Congress, the presidency and public trust.

• To do:

  I can explain Carter’s domestic difficulties and the significance of his “Crisis of Confidence” speech.

• To do:

  I can explain the four parts of Reaganomics and weigh their results.

• To do:

  I can explain how the War on Drugs developed from Nixon to Clinton and why it is controversial.

• To do:

  I can describe the domestic records of George H. W. Bush and Clinton, including welfare reform, NAFTA and the boom of the 1990s.